Sacrifices
by Pseudometapath
Summary: Being an adventurer isn't supposed to be easy. But killing people...she'd never wanted to have to do that. Everything has its place in the world-some more gruesome and unimaginable than others. One-shot.


Lara's hands were shaking.

Only seconds before her body had been running on pure adrenaline; now, it seemed as though every bit of energy had left her body, leaving her feeling drained. Her vision was blurred. Horrified, she looked down, toward the body at her feet. In the flickering glow of the molten rock pouring from crevices in the ceiling, she could see the sharp, angular features of Natla's young bodyguard thrown into partial shadow. Still trembling, Lara leaned down to get a closer look.

How old had he been? Seventeen? Eighteen? His hard eyes and arrogant sneer betrayed his youth, but now, in the comfort of death, there was no longer anger holding his expression in place. His mouth was half open, his eyes relaxed; he could have been asleep, but Lara knew better. She smoothed his hair off his forehead, and wondered if perhaps this young, almost handsome boy was ever someone different, if he could ever have _been_ someone different. In death, she could almost imagine him slumbering quietly on a couch in some suburban home, the remote on his lap, the television still running. When he'd been alive, when his heart had been beating only moments before, all she'd been able to think about was strategy, the guns gleaming in his hands and the throbbing feeling of dread deep in her gut, knowing that she'd have to take a life to save her own.

And had she? She looked over her shoulder to the other bodyguard, the bigger one. They had killed each other, but had it not been her fault? Hadn't the boy died simply because the other man had wanted to kill her first? She tried to dissuade her thoughts, but she knew that even if the boy had survived the fatal stab wound he'd been administered, she would have finished him off anyway. It was instinct, the exact same principle as killing bloodthirsty wolves and rampaging mutants. It was survival. But looking down into the now-peaceful face of the boy, she couldn't help but feel an enormous amount of guilt and, to a smaller degree, crippling sadness.

Those same instincts took a hold of her after a minute or two, and she tended to her own wounds and, with only slight hesitation, took the boy's guns. They had saved her life, and she knew that, in her possession, they would save her life again. She cringed when she lifted them from the corpse; they were still warm.

She forced herself to move on; her journey wasn't over. As she climbed the craggy rock formations surrounding the entrance to the pyramid, she kept her mind carefully blank but for the task at hand, and when she'd finally managed to get the entrance open, she was temporarily distracted by the way the glowing lava flowed down the cracks in the stone slope. The door at the foot of the slope slid open, and she skidded down until she was able to stumble to a stop. She turned to step through the larged, carved doorway, but something made her halt, turning toward the two bodies sprawled on the ground one last time. She had a strange feeling...she felt as though she was indebted to them, both of them, even the one who had thirsted for her blood. She whispered a quiet word of thanks, and although it was lost in the dull roar of lava flowing from every corner of the room, she felt better all the same.

Turning on her heel, she drew her guns and proceeded, cautiously, but full of a purpose that had been absent minutes before, through the doorway and into the ancient pyramid.

Months later, as she sat perusing an ancient book about the lost city, she turned a timeworn page after taking a sip of her tea and found a crude sketch of a door that looked very similar to the one she'd seen at the entrance to the pyramid. Her eyes skimmed the page; the door had been far more ritualistic then she had once thought, requiring numerous priests and shamans to hold down the pressurized pegs at once...

She reached the bottom of the page, where the most important part of the ritual was detailed. The book slid from her palm a little. She set her tea down.

For the door to operate properly, it required a blood sacrifice. Two human men.


End file.
